CHAPTER III. · ESSAY ON CRITICISM.' Opposite Judgments on the Poem-Imitation of Nature-Origin of False Wit-Authority of the Classics. 1711. HITHERTO, Pope had not advanced beyond a purely conventional circle of ideas. His imitative compositions consist, as we have seen, partly of translations, partly of poems professedly original, but which aim at little beyond repro-ducing the external manner of the classical writers, and which exhibit all those defects of judgment ridiculed by Erasmus in his 'Ciceronianus.' Like Bembo and his followers, Pope was at first overpowered by models of unrivalled literary excellence, and, in his desire to copy them exactly, failed to understand the life and spirit which constituted the propriety of the original style. His industry, however, brought its reward, for, by constantly seeking English equivalents for Latin idioms, he found out many subtle secrets of harmony. in his mother tongue, so that afterwards, when he formed. really original conceptions, he had no difficulty in clothing them in musical language. We come now to a poem in which he is seen to be formally defining for himself the real meaning of 'correctness' in poetry, and to be reasoning on the relation between the spirit of classical antiquity and the circumstances of his own age. Pope himself gives two different dates for the composition of the Essay on Criticism.' On the title-page of the poem, when it was published in the volume of 1717, he CHAP. UL.] announced that it was written in the year 1709, and he repeated the statement in every fresh edition of his works up to 1743; when Warburton observed, in the last sentence of his Commentary, that the Essay was 'the work of an author who had not yet attained the twentieth year of his age.' In explanation of the discrepancy Richardson says: "Mr. Pope told me himself that the Essay on Criticism' was indeed written in 1707, though said 1709 by mistake." To Spence the "My poct made contradictory statements on the subject. Essay on Criticism,'" said he on one occasion, "was written in 1709, and published in 1711, which is as little time as ever I let anything of mine lie by me." But at another time he told him: "I showed Walsh my 'Essay on Criticism' in 1706” (meaning evidently 1707). "He died the year after."' Walsh died on March 15,1708, and the fact is recorded by Pope in a note to the Letters between himself and Walsh published in the year 1735. With studied ambiguity the date of the composition of the Essay is variously stated in different copies of this edition. In some the note runs: "Mr. Walsh died at 49 years old in the year 1708. The year after Mr. Pope writ the Essay on Criticism."" In others: "Mr. Walsh died in 1708, the year after Mr. Pope writ the Essay on Criticism.'" This is a curious illustration of Lady Bolingbroke's remark that Pope loved to play the politician over cabbages and turnips. In 1735, being anxious to obtain a reputation for precocity, he ante-dated the composition of the Essay; but he left a line of retreat open to himself in case of need, by adopting, in the professedly spurious edition of his Correspondence, the variety of punctuation above described. "The things that I have written fastest," said Pope to Spence, "have always pleased the most. I wrote the Essay on Criticism' fast; for I had digested all the matter in prose before I began upon it in versc." It would appear, however, 1 MS. Note by Richardson in the Quarto of 1717. 3 Spence, Arecilotes,' p. 129. 4 that this poem was far from obtaining speedy popularity. It was published anonymously on May 15, 1711, and Lewis, the Catholic bookseller, told Warton that "it lay many days in his shop unnoticed and unread." Pope afterwards declared that he had not expected the sale to be quick, as "not one gentleman in sixty, even of liberal education, could understand it." Piqued, however, by neglect, and his appetite for praise having been whetted by the success of his 'Pastorals,' he ordered copies to be sent to several noblemen of taste, among others to Lord Lansdown and to the Duke of Buckingham. Curiosity about the poem was thus aroused, and when the authorship became known and a laudatory notice appeared in the Spectator,' the demand for it increased; nevertheless a year passed before the first edition, consisting of one thousand copies, was exhausted. Long before the sale began to move, however, the 'Essay' had attracted one reader who proceeded promptly to give the world his opinion of its merits. John Dennis was at this time fiftyfour years old. He had been educated at Cambridge, where he had acquired considerable learning, which had obtained for him the acquaintance of Dryden, Wycherley, and Congreve. A vigorous prose writer, he was unsuccessful as a poet and a dramatist, and he was extremely poor. He was well known for the violence of his Whiggism, his hatred of the French, and many habits of eccentric irritability; but his opinion on literary questions was listened to with interest, and with some respect, in the clubs and coffee-houses which he frequented. It is probable that he had pronounced an unfavourable judgment on Pope's 'Pastorals,' for the latter, in his 'Epistle to Arbuthnot,' speaking of his early poems, says: 'Yet then did Dennis rave with furious fret.' This offence was remembered and punished by a passage in the 'Essay on Criticism,' in which the poet gave the first mature example of his powers of personal satire. Speaking of the necessity of independence in criticism he says: ""Twere well might critics still this freedom take, In these lines there were three sharp strokes. The first was in the name 'Appius,' an allusion to an unlucky Tragedy by Dennis, called 'Appius and Virginia,' which had been acted and condemned in 1709. It is said it was for this play that Dennis invented the new system of stage thunder, the appropriation of which by some other dramatist caused him the lively emotion described in the well-known anecdote recorded in the notes to the Dunciad." Still harder to bear was the accuracy of the description, which, like all Pope's best satire, is not only particular but typical, and raises an admirable image of an angry critic. Lastly, there was special point in the use of the word 'tremendous,' which, besides being exactly appropriate to the ideal description, was a favourite epithet with Dennis. "If," says Gildon, speaking of another unsuccessful play by the former, "there is anything of tragedy in the piece, it lies in the word 'tremendous,' for he is so fond of it he had rather use it in every page than slay his beloved Iphigenia." Smarting under these sarcasms, Dennis hastened to crush his presumptuous foe, in a pamphlet, published on June 20, 1711, of thirty-two pages of small print (with a preface of five pages more), entitled 'Reflections, Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody called an Essay upon Criticism.' It was printed by Lintot, who, says Pope in a letter to Cromwell of June 25, 1711, "favoured me with a sight of Mr. Dennis's piece of fine satire before it was published." In it Dennis complains that he had been "attacked in a clandestine manner in his person instead of his writings." The complaint was groundless, for there was no real concealment of the authorship of the 'Essay,' nor could the satire which reflected on the critic's ''Dunciad,' ii. 226, and wōte. inability to keep his temper, be fairly said to be directed against his person. In any case Dennis's method of retaliation was monstrous and out of all proportion to the nature of the attack. In one passage he speaks of Pope as a hunch-backed toad.' In another he says: "If you have a mind to inquire between Sunninghill and Oakingham for a young, short, squab gentleman, an eternal writer of amorous pastoral madrigals, and the very bow of the god of Love, you will be soon directed to him. And pray, as soon as you have taken a survey of him, tell me whether he is a proper author to make personal reflections upon others. This little author may extol the ancients as much and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern, for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father had by consequence by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his pocms-the life of half a day." As to Pope's moral character, Dennis describes him as "a little affected hypocrite, who had nothing in his mouth at the same time but truth, candour, good nature, humanity, and magnanimity." It was not likely that insults of this kind would be readily forgotten by a man of Pope's temper: the remembrance of them was stored up for retaliation as soon as the opportunity offered; and thus from a succession of mutual injuries grew what was perhaps the bitterest, and certainly the longest, quarrel in Pope's literary life. In point of critical matter the pamphlet is by no means the most forcible of Dennis's attacks upon Pope. No attempt is made in it to examine the Essay' by any regular method of criticism. A general charge of subservience to the ancients is brought against the author; but the bulk of the 'Reflcetions' consist of censures of particular passages, which, in respect both of thought and language, are often twisted from their plain meaning. The envy and malignity of the critic betray themselves, not only by the violence of his invective, but by the bitterness with which, in conclusion, he declaims |